Michael Ballaban

"That's not the motorcycle I want," you think, about the new Ariel Ace. "That's rubbish, it's got the wrong forks and the wrong seats, and the wrong handlebars, and the wrong wheels. It's wrong, wrong, wrong." Well, good news, because Ariel has another bike for you. And it's also called the Ariel Ace.

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And here it is.

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Yes, the two bikes you've seen so far are both, actually, Ariel Aces. They're the first two prototypes for Ariel's first new motorcycle in about 50 years, and the company's second new vehicle since its 1999 re-boot with the face-ripping Ariel Atom.

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The pieces that the bikes have in common are the trellis frame, machined out of six solid pieces of billet aluminum, a tuned 173-horsepower V4 engine from the Honda VFR1200F, the transmission, which comes in a choice of standard manual or a dual-clutch setup with an automatic mode, and, really, that's about it.

You can change pretty much everything else. Don't like the trick multi-link girder front end? Swap 'em for a more traditional set of upside down forks. Don't like the handlebars, seat, or foot rests? Swap 'em for a better riding position. Don't like the fuel tank?

Swap it.

Oh, but you won't be really "swapping" anything, not at first, at least. That's because you can design your own bike first, at which point it'll be hand-built at Ariel's factory by a single technician. You can even visit the person building it during the manufacturing process and, presumably, annoy the hell at of them, if that's what you want.

But after it's all done, you'll still be able to come back to the factory for different bits, pieces, and upgrades. It's like if you could bring your Honda Civic in to the plant in Indiana where it was built, because one day you decided you wanted to turn it into a station wagon instead.

You can build anything you want from the basic Ace components, from a cruiser to a naked bike to a super sports bike.

If you were looking for another face-ripper like the Atom, however, you've come to the wrong place, sort of. While yes, you can configure it as a super sports bike if that's what you want, Ariel's saying that they took a look at the market and found there were plenty of visage-destroying devices already, and most were beyond the range of the average rider.

So the market wasn't there. Instead, they're hoping to sell this bike for around £20,000 to approximately 100 - 150 people a year.